Managing multiple roles during the COVID-19 lockdown: Not men or women, but parents as the emotional “loser in the crisis”

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a global crisis with high demands for the general population. In this research, we conducted a cross-sectional online study (N = 2278), which was diverse regarding age, employment, and family status to examine emotional well-being in times of the lockdown. We focused on inter-role conflict as a central factor associated with well-being. We tested whether individuals with high inter-role conflict (e.g. care-taker and employee) would appraise the lockdown more negatively than those experiencing low role-conflict and whether this would be associated with fatigue. In addition, we looked at gender as moderating this link. Latent modelling only showed small gender specific effects in the non-parent sample. However, in the parent sample, we found that although men experience less inter-role conflict than women on average, they coped significantly less well with it. We discuss the role of gender stereotypes in creating these psychological obstacles for men and women. peerReviewed publishedVersion